A magical, disconcerting novel set in Havana about a woman reckoning with the death of her husband
Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida. Her first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Her second collection of stories, The Isle of Youth (FSG Originals, 2013), received the Rosenthal Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her first novel, Find Me (FSG, 2015), was long-listed for the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize. She lives in the Boston area.
Always vivid . . . There's no denying [van den Berg's] skill at
rendering this material; her sentences, at their best, are
extraordinarily lucid, lodging places and people indelibly in
memory . . . Read [The Third Hotel] as the inscrutable future cult
classic it probably is, and let yourself be carried along by its
twisting, unsettling currents. --J. Robert Lennon, The New York
Times Book Review There's Borges and Bolaño, Kafka and Cortázar,
Modiano and Murakami, and now Laura van den Berg. The acclaimed
author of two story collections and a novel, van den Berg has
always been good, but with The Third Hotel she's become fantastic
-- in every sense of the word . . . The fantastic plot is elevated
by van den Berg's fantastic writing and unique twists of language .
. . . --Randy Rosenthal, The Washington Post This is no
Hitchcockian tale of a double life but an insightful portrait of
grief's power to create 'a dislocation of reality.' Mischievous
details and winningly bizarre characters . . . help the book avoid
melodrama and memorably capture the 'thundering mystery' of
marriage and heartbreak. --The New Yorker Strange, unsettling, and
profound from start to finish, The Third Hotel is a book teeming
with the kind of chaos that can only emanate from the mind. It
could be fairly described as a meditation on grief, or marriage, or
travel; fresh insights on each materialize regularly, at enviable
levels of nuance . . . [van den Berg] gets under your skin and hits
bone. --David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly Laura van den Berg is
an artist of the uncanny. As with some surrealist painting, devour
her work quickly and the trick will not snag . . . Clare's eerie
perceptional wobbles are conjured beautifully by van den Berg, who
sees like a painter and narrates like a crime reporter. To read The
Third Hotel sometimes feels like following a character based on
Joan Didion sinking deeper into a universe whose laws were written
by Patricia Highsmith. --John Freeman, The Boston Globe The Third
Hotel contains all of the ingredients for a classic work of horror
. . . Not every author can make a character both fly through
supernatural events and remain grounded in a place the way van den
Berg does with Clare. The strength of van den Berg's storytelling
comes from Clare's attempts to solve the mystery of why Richard has
hunkered down in a different country, layered with grief from back
home that continues to haunt her. She's a "final girl" whose
denouement horrifies in a modern, bloodless way. --Bethanne
Patrick, TIME Van Den Berg doesn't do neatness. She does elegance.
She writes with off-kilter beauty and absolute relaxation; the less
peaceful a sentence should be, the more peaceful it is . . . The
Third Hotel is a novel that operates in symbols and layers, which
means you can read it however you like.--Lily Meyer, NPR.org
Wonderful, lucid, mysterious. --James Wood, Conde Nast Traveler
Beautiful and unsettling . . . Julio Cortázar could see himself
walking the partially erased and re-inscribed streets of van den
Berg's imagination, but in the end those streets are, without a
doubt, van den Berg's own. --Christian Kiefer, The Paris Review
(Staff Pick) The Third Hotel sets a creepy, unsettling mood . . . .
Steeped in magical realism, The Third Hotel is a dreamy and lushly
rendered study of bereavement, the loneliness of travel, and the
intricacies of a marriage. This is a gorgeous and layered novel
that will haunt you for days after you've finished. --Samantha
Irby, Marie Claire Eerie and uncanny, layered and sharp . . .
Though subtly drawn, what it means to be a woman becomes just as
central to The Third Hotel as the mystery of Richard's
reappearance. Powerful and atmospheric, van den Berg's novel
portrays a haunting descent into grief and the mysteries we can't
quite solve while advancing a thought-provoking exploration of
marriage, misogyny, and the loneliness that lurks within unwavering
privacy. --Lauren Sarazen, Los Angeles Review of Books A twisty
exploration of grief and perception as well as the ways in which we
contribute to our own undoing. --Julia Pierpont, O, the Oprah
Magazine Reading Laura van den Berg's disquieting new novel, The
Third Hotel, is akin to walking out of a dark movie theater into
bright sunlight. Part of you is still living in a cinematic
dreamscape. The real world is what's imaginary . . . the writing is
lovely and fluid. --Nancy Pate, Minneapolis Star Tribune In
evocative, lucid prose, van den Berg conjures the psyche of a woman
unmoored, and examines how marriage and solitude, travel and
domesticity, and other forces create and stabilize our identities.
The Third Hotel is dense with everything that makes a novel
memorable: psychological complexity, sensory vividness, narrative
tension and ideas about humanity and art. --Claire Fallon,
Huffington Post The Third Hotel is both a meditation on sorrow and
longing--for answers, insight, closure--and a haunted and haunting
quest narrative whose slimness belies an ocean of eerie power . . .
An utterly transfixing, dreamlike descent into the depths of a
psyche stricken by grief and confusion, The Third Hotel is
miniature marvel and the most unsettling book you'll read all year.
--Dan Sheehan, LitHub Laura van den Berg's brilliant new novel, The
Third Hotel, is a quasi-supernatural tale of loss and grief, told
with an exquisite flair for language . . . The Third Hotel is van
den Berg's second novel and fourth book of fiction, and with it,
she has firmly established herself as one of this country's premier
stylists. A dreamy otherworldliness haunts these pages, and will, I
wager, haunt you, as it did me, long after you finish this slim and
masterful mood piece. --Nick White, Chicago Review of Books
Gorgeously eerie . . . Dense and uncompromisingly intelligent, The
Third Hotel is uninterested in leading the reader to a simple
answer. Buoyed by van den Berg's sinuous, marvelous sentences, the
novel is instead a deep dive into memory, love, and loss as
filtered through film theory, metaphysics, and the humid,
sunstroked cityscape of Havana. A lesser writer might have lost
themself in this byzantine world of maybe-doppelgangers and
maybe-zombies and maybe-madness, but Laura van den Berg is one of
our most accomplished storytellers--it is no surprise that she has
elevated the uncannily horrifying into something achingly human.
--Chase Burke, Ploughshares It's a quicksilver novel -- just when
you think you have a possible grip on its plot and meaning, it
slithers out of grasp. The Third Hotel works its magic at the level
of the subconscious, where nightmares are made. --Jenny Shank, The
Dallas Morning News The Third Hotel amounts to more than thrills
and chills. Van den Berg has swapped out the stages of grief for an
alternative recovery process, one that refreshes old notions of
female power and identity . . . This story, adapting horror tropes
to new ends, releases "the widow thrashing within." By catching and
seducing her zombie--and then finally letting him go--Clare's
stages of grief deliver her not to Zen-like acceptance, but to a
place of potent new monsters. --John Dimini, The Sewanee Review
Enter The Third Hotel like a portal, and surrender to a surreal,
vivid, impossible yet clearly realistic adventure . . . Van Den
Berg uses cinematic language, imagery and structure in this
impressionistic portrait of a marriage that has come undone, a
woman whose reality is skewed and a sea swept island filled with
seductive art, strange vistas and unexpected danger. --Jane
Ciabattari, BBC Culture The Third Hotel will play tricks on
you--and that's the point . . . The Third Hotel is a meditation on
the thin fault line between imagination and reality, on grief, and
on marriage. It's Twin Peaks meets literary fiction. --Elena
Nicolaou, Refinery29 Van den Berg's clean, descriptive prose brings
full images and sensory detail to life without drawing attention to
the writing. The shapeshifting city of Havana is a riveting
character in itself, and contributes greatly to the atmosphere. The
Third Hotel explores the oddities of travel and relationships;
silence and noise; and the effects of past trauma. Like Clare, it
is an engrossing, thought-provoking enigma. --Julia Kastner, Shelf
Awareness A reality-blurring rumination on the power of grief and
alienation . . . Lush in description and psychology alike, The
Third Hotel is a literary horror novel that will haunt you long
past its final page. --Emily Nordling, tor.com Laura van den Berg's
new novel, The Third Hotel, covers a thematically sprawling range
of subjects, from zombie films to the secret flaws of a marriage to
the process of grieving someone who may not be as dead as initially
expected. The result is a haunting, ambiguous novel, cerebral and
tactile in equal measure. --Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Laced through with sharp insights--not just on marriage and grief,
but also on the pull of travel and the dynamics of horror
movies--the layers of [The Third Hotel] fit together so seamlessly
they're almost Escher-esque. The line between the real and the
imagined is forever blurry, and the result of all that ambiguity is
both moving and unsettling. Gorgeously haunting and wholly
original; a novel that rewards patience. --Kirkus Mysterious and
engrossing . . . Toying with horror tropes and conventions, and
displaying shades of authors such as Julio Cortázar, van den Berg
turns Clare's journey into a dreamlike exploration of grief. This
is a potent novel about life, death, and the afterlife.
--Publishers Weekly The Third Hotel luxuriates in the fertile
narrative ground of the uncanny, the phantasmagoric and the depths
of grief. Van den Berg explores the contours of the most intimate
human relationships: between married couples and between parents
and children. This is heavy stuff, but Van den Berg also delights
in her fluency with film culture and Latin American modes of
expression. --Ryne Clos, Spectrum Culture Brooding, often-surreal,
funerally bemusing . . . van den Berg's entrancing, gorgeously
enigmatic tale dramatizes the narcosis of grief. --Booklist "I love
Laura van den Berg for her eeriness and her elegance, the way the
fabric of her stories is woven on a slightly warped loom so that
you read her work always a bit perturbed. The Third Hotel is
artfully fractured, slim and singular; it's a book that sings, but
always with a strange pressure more felt than heard beneath the
song." --Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies "In this
gorgeous, frighteningly smart novel, a woman deranged by grief
becomes an imposter in her own life. As inventive and inexorable as
a dream, The Third Hotel is a devastating excavation of the
unconscionable demands we place on those we love, and a profound
portrait of the uncanny composite creature that is a marriage.
Laura van den Berg is one of our best writers, an absolute marvel."
--Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You "I love the way
Laura van den Berg writes. The Third Hotel is another of her
beguiling little masterpieces. One that, with ruminative grace and
sublime wit, answers and elucidates the question of what it means
to be human." --Miriam Toews, author of All My Puny Sorrows
"I've always been a huge fan of Laura van den Berg's work, but this
novel took my breath away. The Third Hotel is a ghost story for
grownups--when the search for clarity becomes obscure and reality
is increasingly blurred. There is so much confidence and daring in
her writing, but at the same time her slanted view of the world
holds a kind of humility and clarity that makes it all feel so
achingly human. Elegant, twisted, and propulsive, I loved it.
--Claire Cameron, author of The Last Neanderthal "After finishing
The Third Hotel I found myself reeling for days. What a triumph of
a book! Such a gorgeous, intelligent excavation of marriage, loss,
art, flânerie. Simply spending time inside Laura van den Berg's
elegant, muscular sentences has made me a better writer." --Kristen
Iskandrian, author of Motherest Dazzling . . . Van Den Berg gives
loveliness to the gruesome while opening up the novel's world to
all kinds of ghosts. The real emotional power of the novel,
however, beyond the elegance of its language and the precision and
momentum of its telling, builds from what ends up being a brutal
moment of confrontation. The scene brought tears to my eyes when I
read it. --Chaya Bhuvansewar, Michigan Quarterly Review
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